Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (Autumn 1985), 235-61

{235} It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century
British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as
England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural
representation of England to the English. The role of literature
in the production of cultural representation should not be
ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in
the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This
itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist
project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.

If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study of
British literature but in the study of the literatures of the
European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we
would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the
"worlding" of what is now called "the Third World." To consider
the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich
intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted,
and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence
of "the Third World" as a signifier that allows us to forget
that "worlding," even as it expands the empire of the literary
discipline.1

It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective
of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism. A
basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the
female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high
feminist norm. It is supported and operated by an
information-retrieval {236} approach to "Third World" literature
which often employs a deliberately "nontheoretical" methodology
with self-conscious rectitude.

In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the
"worlding" of what is today "the Third World" by what has become
a cult text of feminism: Jane Eyre.2 I plot the
novel's reach and grasp, and locate its structural motors. I
read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre's
reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis -- even a
deconstruction -- of a "worlding" such as Jane Eyre's.3

I need hardly mention that the object of my investigation is the
printed book, not its "author." To make such a distinction is,
of course, to ignore the lessons of deconstruction. A
deconstructive critical approach would loosen the binding of the
book, undo the opposition between verbal text and the bio-graphy of the named subject
"Charlotte Brontë," and see the two as each other's "scene
of writing:" In such a reading, the life that writes itself as
"my life" is as much a production in psychosocial space (other
names can be found) as the book that is written by the holder of
that named life -- a book that is then consigned to what is most
often recognized as genuinely "social": the world of publication
and distribution.4 To touch Brontë's "life" in
such a way, however, would be too risky here. We must rather
strategically take shelter in an essentialism which, not wishing
to lose the important advantages won by U.S. mainstream
feminism, will continue to honor the suspect binary oppositions
-- book and author, individual and history -- and start with an
assurance of the following sort: my readings here do not seek to
undermine the excellence of the individual artist. If even
minimally successful, the readings will incite a degree of rage
against the imperialist narrativization of history, that it
should produce so abject a script for her. I provide these
assurances to allow myself some room to situate feminist
individualism in its historical determination rather than simply
to canonize it as feminism as such.

Sympathetic U.S. feminists have remarked that I do not do
justice to Jane Eyre's subjectivity. A word of explanation is
perhaps in order. The broad strokes of my presuppositions are
that what is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of
imperialism, is precisely the making of human beings, the
constitution and "interpellation" of the subject not only as
individual but as "individualist."5 This stake is represented on two
registers: childbearing and soul making. The first is
domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction cathected as
"companionate love"; the second is the imperialist project {237}
cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission. As the female
individualist, not-quite/not-male, articulates herself in
shifting relationship to what is at stake, the "native female"
as such (within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded
from any share in this emerging norm.6 If we read this account from an
isolationist perspective in a "metropolitan" context, we see
nothing there but the psychobiography of the militant female
subject. In a reading such as mine, in contrast, the effort is
to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the
"subject-constitution" of the female individualist.

To develop further the notion that my stance need not be an
accusing one, I will refer to a passage from Roberto Fernandez
Retamar's "Caliban."7 Jose Enrique Rodo had argued in
1900 that the model for the Latin American intellectual in
relationship to Europe could be Shakespeare's Ariel.8 In 1971
Retamar, denying the possibility of an identifiable "Latin
American Culture," recast the model as Caliban. Not
surprisingly, this powerful exchange still excludes any specific
consideration of the civilizations of the Maya, the Aztecs, the
Incas, or the smaller nations of what is now called Latin
America. Let us note carefully that, at this stage of my
argument, this "conversation" between Europe and Latin America
(without a specific consideration of the political economy of
the "worlding" of the "native") provides a sufficient thematic
description of our attempt to confront the ethnocentric and
reverse-ethnocentric benevolent double bind (that is,
considering the "native" as object for enthusiastic
information-retrieval and thus denying its own "worlding") that
I sketched in my opening paragraphs.

In a moving passage in "Caliban," Retamar locates both Caliban
and Ariel in the postcolonial intellectual:

There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity: both are slaves in the
hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude
and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature
of the air, although also a child of the isle, is the
intellectual.

As we attempt to unlearn our so-called privilege as Ariel and
"seek from [a certain] Caliban the honor of a place in his
rebellious and glorious ranks," we do not ask that our students
and colleagues should emulate us but that they should attend to
us ("C," p. 72). If, {238} however, we are driven by a nostalgia
for lost origins, we too run the risk of effacing the "native"
and stepping forth as "the real Caliban," of forgetting that he
is a name in a play, an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by
an interpretable text.9 The stagings of Caliban work
alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be
Caliban legitimizes the very individualism that we must
persistently attempt to undermine from within.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in an article on history and women's
history, shows us how to define the historical moment of
feminism in the West in terms of female access to
individualism.10 The battle for female
individualism plays itself out within the larger theater of the
establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the
aesthetic field by the ideology of "the creative imagination."
Fox-Genovese's presupposition will guide us into the beautifully
orchestrated opening of Jane Eyre. It is a scene of the
marginalization and privatization of the protagonist: "There was
no possibility of taking a walk that day. . . .
Out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of
it," Brontë writes (JE, p. 9). The movement
continues as Jane breaks the rules of the appropriate topography
of withdrawal. The family at the center withdraws into the
sanctioned architectural space of the withdrawing room or
drawing room; Jane inserts herself -- "I slipped in" -- into the
margin "A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing room"
(JE, p. 9; my emphasis).

The manipulation of the domestic inscription of space within the
upwardly mobilizing currents of the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in England and France is well
known. It seems fitting that the place to which Jane withdraws
is not only not the withdrawing room but also not the dining
room, the sanctioned place of family meals. Nor is it the
library, the appropriate place for reading. The breakfast room
"contained a book-case" (JE, p. 9). As Rudolph Ackerman
wrote in his Repository (1823), one of the many manuals
of taste in circulation in nineteenth-century England, these low
bookcases and stands were designed to "contain all the books
that may be desired for a sitting-room without reference to the
library."11
Even in this already triply off-center place, "having drawn the
red moreen curtain nearly close, I [Jane] was shrined in double
retirement" (JE, pp. 9-10).

Here in Jane's self-marginalized uniqueness, the reader becomes
her accomplice: the reader and Jane are united -- both are
reading. Yet Jane still preserves her odd privilege, for she
continues never {239} quite doing the proper thing in its proper
place. She cares little for reading what is meant to be
read: the "letter-press." She reads the pictures. The power of
this singular hermeneutics is precisely that it can make the
outside inside. "At intervals, while turning over the leaves of
my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon." Under
"the clear panes of glass," the rain no longer penetrates, "the
drear November day" is rather a one-dimensional "aspect" to be
"studied," not decoded like the "letter-press" but, like
pictures, deciphered by the unique creative imagination of the
marginal individualist (JE, p. 10).

Before following the track of this unique imagination, let us
consider the suggestion that the progress of Jane Eyre
can be charted through a sequential arrangement of the
family/counter-family dyad. In the novel, we encounter, first,
the Reeds as the legal family and Jane, the late Mr. Reed's
sister's daughter, as the representative of a near incestuous
counter-family; second, the Brocklehursts, who run the school
Jane is sent to, as the legal family and Jane, Miss Temple, and
Helen Burns as a counter-family that falls short because it is
only a community of women; third, Rochester and the mad Mrs.
Rochester as the legal family and Jane and Rochester as the
illicit counter-family. Other items may be added to the thematic
chain in this sequence: Rochester and Celine Varens as
structurally functional counter-family; Rochester and Blanche
Ingram as dissimulation of legality -- and so on. It is during
this sequence that Jane is moved from the counter-family to the
family-in-law. In the next sequence, it is Jane who restores
full family status to the as-yet-incomplete community of
siblings, the Riverses. The final sequence of the book is a
community of families, with Jane, Rochester, and their
children at the center.

In terms of the narrative energy of the novel, how is Jane moved
from the place of the counter-family to the family-in-law? It is
the active ideology of imperialism that provides the discursive
field.

(My working definition of "discursive field" must assume the
existence of discrete "systems of signs" at hand in the socius,
each based on a specific axiomatics. I am identifying these
systems as discursive fields. "Imperialism as social mission"
generates the possibility of one such axiomatics. How the
individual artist taps the discursive field at hand with a sure
touch, if not with transhistorical clairvoyance, in order to
make the narrative structure move I hope to demonstrate through
the following example. It is crucial that we extend our analysis
of this example beyond the minimal diagnosis of "racism.")

{240} Let us consider the figure of Bertha Mason, a figure
produced by the axiomatics of imperialism. Through Bertha Mason,
the white Jamaican Creole, Brontë renders the human/animal
frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater
than the letter of the Law can be broached. Here is the
celebrated passage, given in the voice of Jane:

In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran
backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human
being, one could not . . . tell: it grovelled,
seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some
strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a
quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head
and face. [JE, p. 295]

In a matching passage, given in the voice of Rochester speaking
to Jane, Brontë presents the imperative for a shift
beyond the Law as divine injunction rather than human motive. In
the terms of my essay, we might say that this is the register
not of mere marriage or sexual reproduction but of Europe and
its not-yet-human Other, of soul making. The field of imperial
conquest is here inscribed as Hell:

"One night I had been awakened by her yells . . . it
was a fiery West Indian night. . . .

"'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell! -- this is the air --
those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a
right to deliver myself from it if I can. . . .
Let me break away, and go home to God!'. . .

"A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through
the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed,
and the air grew pure. . . . It was true Wisdom that
consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path.
. . .

"The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the
refleshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious
liberty.
. . .

"'Go,' said Hope, 'and live again in Europe. . . .
You have done all that God and Humanity require of you.'"

(pp. 310-11; my emphasis)

It is the unquestioned ideology of imperialist axiomatics, then,
that conditions Jane's move from the counter-family set to the
set of the family-in-law. Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton
have seen this only in terms of the ambiguous class
position of the governess.12 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, on
the other hand, have seen Bertha Mason only in psychological
terms, as Jane's dark double.13

{241} I will not enter the critical debates that offer
themselves here. Instead, 1 will develop the suggestion that
nineteenth-century feminist individualism could conceive of a
"greater" project than access to the closed circle of the
nuclear family. This is the project of soul making beyond "mere"
sexual reproduction. Here the native "subject" is not almost an
animal but rather the object of what might be termed the
terrorism of the categorical imperative.

I am using "Kant" in this essay as a metonym for the most
flexible ethical moment in the European eighteenth century. Kant
words the categorical imperative, conceived as the universal
moral law given by pure reason, in this way: "In all creation
every thing one chooses and over which one has any power, may be
used merely as means; man alone, and with him every
rational creature, is an end in himself." It is thus a
moving displacement of Christian ethics from religion to
philosophy. As Kant writes: "With this agrees very well the
possibility of such a command as: Love God above everything,
and thy neighbor as thyself. For as a command it requires
respect for a law which commands love and does not leave
it to our own arbitrary choice to make this our principle."14

The "categorical" in Kant cannot be adequately represented in
determinately grounded action. The dangerous transformative
power of philosophy, however, is that its formal subtlety can be
travestied in the service of the state. Such a travesty in the
case of the categorical imperative can justify the imperialist
project by producing the following formula: make the
heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in
himself.15
This project is presented as a sort of tangent in Jane
Eyre, a tangent that escapes the closed circle of the
narrative conclusion. The tangent narrative is the story
of St. John Rivers, who is granted the important task of
concluding the text.

At the novel's end, the allegorical language of Christian
psychobiography -- rather than the textually constituted and
seemingly private grammar of the creative imagination
which we noted in the novel's opening -- marks the
inaccessibility of the imperialist project as such to the
nascent "feminist" scenario. The concluding passage of Jane
Eyre places St. John Rivers within the fold of Pilgrim's
Progress. Eagleton pays no attention to this but accepts
the novel's ideological lexicon, which establishes St. John
Rivers' heroism by identifying a life in Calcutta with an
unquestioning choice of death. Gilbert and Gubar, by calling
Jane Eyre "Plain Jane's progress," see the novel as
simply replacing the male protagonist with {242} the female.
They do not notice the distance between sexual reproduction and
soul making, both actualized by the unquestioned idiom of
imperialist presuppositions evident in the last part of Jane
Eyre:

Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and
truth, [St. John Rivers] labours for his race. . . .
His is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his
pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. . . .
His is the ambition of the high master-spirit[s] . . .
who stand without fault before the throne of God; who share the
last mighty victories of the Lamb; who are called, and chosen,
and faithful. (JE, p. 455]

Earlier in the novel, St. John Rivers himself justifies the
project: "My vocation? My great work? . . . My hopes
of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in
the glorious one of bettering their race -- of carrying
knowledge into the realms of ignorance -- of substituting peace
for war -- freedom for bondage -- religion for superstition --
the hope of heaven for the fear of hell?" (JE, p. 376).
Imperialism and its territorial and subject-constituting project
are a violent deconstruction of these oppositions.

When Jean Rhys, born on the Caribbean island of Dominica, read
Jane Eyre as a child, she was moved by Bertha Mason: "I
thought I'd try to write her a life."16Wide Sargazso Sea, the slim
novel published in 1965, at the end of Rhys' long career, is
that "life."

I have suggested that Bertha's function in Jane Eyre is
to render indeterminate the boundary between human and animal
and thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not
the letter of the Law. When Rhys rewrites the scene in Jane
Eyre where Jane hears "a snarling, snatching sound, almost
like a dog quarrelling" and then encounters a bleeding Richard
Mason (JE, p. 210), she keeps Bertha's humanity, indeed
her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact. Grace Poole,
another character originally in Jane Eyre, describes the
incident to Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea: "So you don't
remember that you attacked this gentleman with a knife?
. . . I didn't hear all he said except 'I cannot
interfere legally between yourself and your husband'. It was
when he said 'legally' that you flew at him" (WSS, p.
150). In Rhys' retelling, it is the dissimulation that Bertha
discerns in the word "legally" -- not an innate bestiality --
that prompts her violent reaction.

{243} In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso
Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that
so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be
determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as a
white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in
Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialist and the black
native. In recounting Antoinette's development, Rhys
reinscribes some thematics of Narcissus.

There are, noticeably, many images of mirroring in the text. I
will quote one from the first section. In this passage, Tia is
the little black servant girl who is Antoinette's close
companion: "We had eaten the same food, slept side by side,
bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with
Tia and I will be like her. . . . When I was close I
saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it.
. . . We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears
on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass"
(WSS, p. 38).

A progressive sequence of dreams reinforces this mirror
imagery. In its second occurrence, the dream is partially set
in a hortus conclusus, or "enclosed garden" -- Rhys uses
the phrase (WSS, p. 50) -- a Romance rewriting of the
Narcissus topos as the place of encounter with Love.17 In the
enclosed garden, Antoinette encounters not Love but a strange
threatening voice that says merely "in here," inviting her into
a prison which masquerades as the legalization of love
(WSS, p. 50).

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus' madness is disclosed
when he recognizes his Other as his self: "Iste ego sum."18 Rhys makes
Antoinette see her self as her Other, Brontë's
Bertha. In the last section of Wide Sargasso Sea,
Antoinette acts out Jane Eyre's conclusion and recognizes
herself as the so-called ghost in Thornfield Hall: "I went into
the hall again with the tall candle in my hand. It was then that
I saw her -- the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was
surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her" (WSS, p. 154).
The gilt frame encloses a mirror: as Narcissus' pool reflects
the selfed Other, so this "pool" reflects the Othered self. Here
the dream sequence ends, with an invocation of none other than
Tia, the Other that could not be selfed, because the fracture of
imperialism rather than the Ovidian pool intervened. (I will
return to this difficult point.) "That was the third time I had
my dream, and it ended. . . . I called 'Tia' and
jumped and woke" (WSS, p. 155). It is now, at the very
end of the book, that Antoinette/Bertha can say: "Now at last I
know why I was brought here and what I have to do" (WSS,
pp. 15556). We can read this as her having been brought into the
{244} England of Brontë's novel: "This cardboard house" --
a book between cardboard covers -- "where I walk at night is not
England" (WSS, p. 148). In this fictive England, she must
play out her role, act out the transformation of her "self" into
that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so
that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of
British fiction. I must read this as an allegory of the general
epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a
self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the
social mission of the colonizer. At least Rhys sees to it that
the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as an insane
animal for her sister's consolidation.

Critics have remarked that Wide Sargasso Sea treats the
Rochester character with understanding and sympathy.19 Indeed, he
narrates the entire middle section of the book. Rhys makes it
clear that he is a victim of the patriarchal inheritance law of
entailment rather than of a father's natural preference for the
firstborn: in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester's situation is
clearly that of a younger son dispatched to the colonies to buy
an heiress. If in the case of Antoinette and her identity, Rhys
utilizes the thematics of Narcissus, in the case of Rochester
and his patrimony, she touches on the thematics of Oedipus. (In
this she has her finger on our "historical moment." If, in the
nineteenth century, subject-constitution is represented as
childbearing and soul making, in the twentieth century
psychoanalysis allows the West to plot the itinerary of the
subject from Narcissus [the "imaginary"] to Oedipus [the
"symbolic"]. This subject, however, is the normative male
subject. In Rhys' reinscription of these themes, divided between
the female and the male protagonist, feminism and a critique of
imperialism become complicit.)

In place of the "wind from Europe" scene, Rhys substitutes the
scenario of a suppressed letter to a father, a letter which
would be the "correct" explanation of the tragedy of the book.20 "I thought
about the letter which should have been written to England a
week ago. Dear Father . . ." (WSS, p. 57). This
is the first instance: the letter not written. Shortly
afterward:

Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me
without question or condition. No provision made for her (that
must be seen to). . . . I will never be a disgrace to
you or to my dear brother the son you love. No begging letters,
no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres of a
younger son. I have sold my soul or {245} you have sold it, and
after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be
beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet . . .
[WSS, p. 59]

This is the second instance: the letter not sent. The formal
letter is uninteresting; I will quote only a part of it:

Dear Father, we have arrived from Jamaica after an uncomfortable
few days. This little estate in the Windward Islands is part of
the family property and Antoinette is much attached to it.
. . . All is well and has gone according to your
plans and wishes. I dealt of course with Richard Mason.
. . . He seemed to become attached to me and trusted
me completely. This place is very beautiful but my illness has
left me too exhausted to appreciate it fully. I will write again
in a few days' time. [WSS, p. 63]

And so on.

Rhys' version of the Oedipal exchange is ironic, not a closed
circle. We cannot know if the letter actually reaches its
destination. "I wondered how they got their letters
posted," the Rochester figure muses. "1 folded mine and put it
into a drawer of the desk. . . . There are blanks in
my mind that cannot be filled up" (WSS, p. 64). It is as
if the text presses us to note the analogy between letter and
mind.

Rhys denies to Brontë's Rochester the one thing that is
supposed to be secured in the Oedipal relay: the Name of the
Father, or the patronymic. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the
character corresponding to Rochester has no name. His writing of
the final version of the letter to his father is supervised, in
fact, by an image of the loss of the patronymic: "There
was a crude bookshelf made of three shingles strung together
over the desk and I looked at the books, Byron's poems, novels
by Sir Walter Scott, Confessions of an Opium Eater
. . . and on the last shelf, Life and Letters of
. . . The rest was eaten away" (WSS, p.
63).

Wide Sargasso Sea marks with uncanny clarity the limits
of its own discourse in Christophine, Antoinette's black nurse.
We may perhaps surmise the distance between Jane Eyre and
Wide Sargasso Sea by remarking that Christophine's
unfinished story is the tangent to the latter narrative, as St.
John Rivers' story is to the former. Christophine is not a
native of Jamaica; she is from Martinique. Taxonomically, she
belongs to the category of the good servant {246} rather than
that of the pure native. But within these borders, Rhys creates
a powerfully suggestive figure.

Christophine is the first interpreter and named speaking subject
in the text. "The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my
mother, 'because she pretty like pretty self' Christophine
said," we read in the book's opening paragraph (WSS, p.
15). I have taught this book five times, once in France, once to
students who had worked on the book with the well-known
Caribbean novelist Wilson Harris, and once at a prestigious
institute where the majority of the students were faculty from
other universities. It is part of the political argument I am
making that all these students blithely stepped over this
paragraph without asking or knowing what Christophine's patois,
so-called incorrect English, might mean.

Christophine is, of course, a commodified person. "'She was your
father's wedding present to me'" explains Antoinette's mother,
"'one of his presents'" (WSS, p. 18). Yet Rhys assigns
her some crucial functions in the text. It is Christophine who
judges that black ritual practices are culture-specific and
cannot be used by whites as cheap remedies for social evils,
such as Rochester's lack of love for Antoinette. Most important,
it is Christophine alone whom Rhys allows to offer a hard
analysis of Rochester's actions, to challenge him in a
face-to-face encounter. The entire extended passage is worthy of
comment. I quote a brief extract:

"She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth
now. She don't come to your house in this place England they
tell me about, she don't come to your beautiful house to beg you
to marry with her. No, it's you come all the long way to her
house -- it's you beg her to marry. And she love you and she
give you all she have. Now you say you don't love her and you
break her up. What you do with her money, eh?" [And then
Rochester, the white man, comments silently to himself] Her
voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said
"money." [WSS, p. 130]

Her analysis is powerful enough for the white man to be afraid:
"I no longer felt dazed, tired, half hypnotized, but alert and
wary, ready to defend myself" (WSS, p. 130).

Rhys does not, however, romanticize individual heroics on the
part of the oppressed. When the Man refers to the forces of Law
and Order, Christophine recognizes their power. This exposure of
civil inequality is emphasized by the fact that, just before the
Man's {247} successful threat, Christophine had invoked the
emancipation of slaves in Jamaica by proclaiming: "No chain
gang, no tread machine, no dark jail either. This is free
country and I am free woman" (WSS, p. 131).

As I mentioned above, Christophine is tangential to this
narrative. She cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a
canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition
in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native. No
perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other
into a self, because the project of imperialism has always
already historically refracted what might have been the
absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the
imperialist self.21 The Caliban of Retamar, caught
between Europe and Latin America, reflects this predicament. We
can read Rhys' reinscription of Narcissus as a thematization of
the same problematic.

Of course, we cannot know Jean Rhys' feelings in the matter. We
can, however, look at the scene of Christophine's inscription in
the text. Immediately after the exchange between her and the
Man, well before the conclusion, she is simply driven out of the
story, with neither narrative nor characterological explanation
or justice. "'Read and write I don't know. Other things I know.'
She walked away without looking back" (WSS, p. 133).

Indeed, if Rhys rewrites the madwoman's attack on the Man by
underlining of the misuse of "legality," she cannot deal with
the passage that corresponds to St. John Rivers' own
justification of his martyrdom, for it has been displaced into
the current idiom of modernization and development. Attempts to
construct the "Third World Woman" as a signifier remind us that
the hegemonic definition of literature is itself caught within
the history of imperialism. A full literary reinscription cannot
easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity,
covered over by an alien legal system masquerading as Law as
such, an alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of
human sciences busy establishing the "native" as
self-consolidating Other.

In the Indian case at least, it would be difficult to find an
ideological clue to the planned epistemic violence of
imperialism merely by rearranging curricula or syllabi within
existing norms of literary pedagogy. For a later period of
imperialism -- when the constituted colonial subject has firmly
taken hold -- straightforward experiments of comparison can be
undertaken, say, between the functionally witless India of
Mrs. Dalloway, on the one hand, and literary {248} texts
produced in India in the 1920s, on the other. But the first half
of the nineteenth century resists questioning through literature
or literary criticism in the narrow sense, because both are
implicated in the project of producing Ariel. To reopen the
fracture without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins, the
literary critic must turn to the archives of imperial
governance.

In conclusion, I shall look briefly at Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, a text of nascent feminism that remains
cryptic, I think, simply because it does not speak the language
of feminist individualism which we have come to hail as the
language of high feminism within English literature. It is
interesting that Barbara Johnson's brief study tries to rescue
this recalcitrant text for the service of feminist
autobiography.22 Alternatively, George Levine reads
Frankenstein in the context of the creative imagination
and the nature of the hero. He sees the novel as a book about
its own writing and about writing itself, a Romantic allegory of
reading within which Jane Eyre as unself-conscious critic would
fit quite nicely.23

I propose to take Frankenstein out of this arena and
focus on it in terms of that sense of English cultural identity
which I invoked at the opening of this essay. Within that focus we are obliged to
admit that, although Frankenstein is ostensibly about the
origin and evolution of man in society, it does not deploy the
axiomatics of imperialism.

Let me say at once that there is plenty of incidental
imperialist sentiment in Frankenstein. My point, within
the argument of this essay, is that the discursive field of
imperialism does not produce unquestioned ideological
correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book. The
discourse of imperialism surfaces in a curiously powerful way in
Shelley's novel, and I will later discuss the moment at which it
emerges.

Frankenstein is not a battleground of male and female
individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction
(family and female) and social subject-production (race and
male). That binary opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein's
laboratory -- an artificial womb where both projects are
undertaken simultaneously, though the terms are never openly
spelled out. Frankenstein's apparent antagonist is God himself as Maker of Man, but
his real competitor is also woman as the maker of children. It
is not just that his dream of the death of mother and bride and
the actual death of his bride are associated with the visit of
his monstrous homoerotic 'son' to his {249} bed. On a much more
overt level, the monster is a bodied "corpse," unnatural because
bereft of a determinable childhood: "No father had watched my
infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses;
or if they had, all my past was now a blot, a blind vacancy in
which I distinguished nothing" (F, pp. 57, 115. It is Frankenstein's own
ambiguous and miscued understanding of the real motive for the
monster's vengefulness that reveals his own competition with
woman as maker:

I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to
assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and
well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still
paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own
species had greater claims to my attention because they included
a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view,
I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion
for the first creature. [F, p. 206]

It is impossible not to notice the accents of transgression
inflecting Frankenstein's demolition of his experiment to create
the future Eve. Even in the laboratory, the woman-in-the-making
is not a bodied corpse but "a human being." The (il)logic of the
metaphor bestows on her a prior existence which Frankenstein
aborts, rather than an anterior death which he reembodies: "The
remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay
scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled
the living flesh of a human being" (F, p. 163).

In Shelley's view, man's hubris as soul maker both usurps the
place of God and attempts -- vainly -- to sublate woman's
physiological prerogative.24 Indeed, indulging a Freudian fantasy here, I could
urge that, if to give and withhold to/from the mother a phallus
is the male fetish, then to give and withhold to/from the
man a womb might be the female fetish.25 The icon of the sublimated womb in
man is surely his productive brain, the box in the head.

In the judgment of classical psychoanalysis, the phallic mother
exists only by virtue of the castration-anxious son; in
Frankenstein's judgment, the hysteric father (Victor
Frankenstein gifted with his laboratory -- the womb of
theoretical reason) cannot produce a daughter. Here the language
of racism -- the dark side of imperialism understood as social
mission -- combines with the hysteria of masculism into the
idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than
subject-constitution. The roles of masculine and {250} feminine
individualists are hence reversed and displaced. Frankenstein
cannot produce a "daughter" because "she might become ten
thousand times more malignant than her mate . . . [and
because] one of the first results of those sympathies for which
the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would
be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence
of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror"
(F, p. 158). This
particular narrative strand also launches a thoroughgoing
critique of the eighteenth-century European discourses on the
origin of society through (Western Christian) man. Should I
mention that, much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's remark in his Confessions,
Frankenstein declares himself to be "by birth a Genevese"
(F, p. 31)?

In this overly didactic text, Shelley's point is that social
engineering should not be based on pure, theoretical, or
natural-scientific reason alone, which is her implicit critique
of the utilitarian vision
of an engineered society. To this end, she presents in the first
part of her deliberately schematic story three characters,
childhood friends, who seem to represent Kant's three-part
conception of the human subject: Victor Frankenstein, the forces
of theoretical reason or "natural philosophy"; Henry Clerval,
the forces of practical reason or "the moral relations of
things"; and Elizabeth Lavenza, that aesthetic judgment -- "the
aerial creation of the poets" -- which, according to Kant, is 'a
suitable mediating link connecting the realm of the concept of
nature and that of the concept of freedom . . .
(which) promotes . . . moral feeling"
(F, pp. 37, 36).26

This three-part subject does not operate harmoniously in
Frankenstein. That Henry Clerval, associated as he is
with practical reason, should have as his "design
. . . to visit India, in the belief that he had in his
knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had
taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the
progress of European colonization and trade" is proof of this,
as well as part of the European imperialist sentiment that I
speak of above (F, pp. 151-52). I should perhaps point
out that the language here is entrepreneurial rather than
missionary:

He came to the university with the design of making himself
complete master of the Oriental languages, as thus he should
open a field for the plan of life he had marked out for
himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his
eyes towards the East as affording scope for his spirit of
enterprise. The Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged
his attention. [F, pp.
66-67]

{251} But it is of course Victor Frankenstein, with his strange
itinerary of obsession with natural philosophy, who offers the
strongest demonstration that the multiple perspectives of the
three-part Kantian subject cannot co-operate harmoniously.
Frankenstein creates a putative human subject out of natural
philosophy alone. According to his own miscued summation: "In a
fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature"
(F, p. 206). It is
not at all farfetched to say that Kant's categorical imperative
can most easily be mistaken for the hypothetical imperative -- a
command to ground in cognitive comprehension what can be
apprehended only by moral will -- by putting natural philosophy
in the place of practical reason.

I should hasten to add here that just as readings such as this
one do not necessarily accuse Charlotte Brontë the named
individual of harboring imperialist sentiments, so also they do
not necessarily commend Mary Shelley the named individual for
writing a successful Kantian allegory. The most I can say is
that it is possible to read these texts, within the frame of
imperialism and the Kantian ethical moment, in a politically
useful way. Such an approach presupposes that a "disinterested"
reading attempts to render transparent the interests of the
hegemonic readership. (Other "political" readings -- for
instance, that the monster is the nascent working class -- can
also be advanced.)

Frankenstein is built in the established epistolary
tradition of multiple frames. At the heart of the multiple
frames, the narrative of the monster (as reported by
Frankenstein to Robert Walton, who then recounts it in a letter
to his sister) is of his almost learning, clandestinely, to be
human. It is invariably noticed that the monster reads Paradise Lost as true
history. What is not so often noticed is that he also reads Plutarch's Lives, "the histories
of the first founders of the ancient republics," which he
compares to "the patriarchal lives of my protectors" (F,
pp. 123, 124). And his education
comes through "Volney's Ruins of Empires,"
which purported to be a prefiguration of the French Revolution,
published after the event and after the author had rounded off
his theory with practice (F, p. 113). It is an attempt at an
enlightened universal secular, rather than a Eurocentric
Christian, history, written from the perspective of a narrator
"from below," somewhat like the attempts of Eric Wolf or Peter
Worsley in our own time.27

This Caliban's education in (universal secular) humanity takes
place through the monster's eavesdropping on the instruction of
an Ariel-Safie, the Christianized "Arabian" to whom "a residence
in Turkey was abhorrent" (F, p. 121). In depicting Safie,
Shelley uses {252} some commonplaces of eighteenth-century
liberalism that are shared by many today: Safie's Muslim father
was a victim of (bad) Christian religious prejudice and yet was
himself a wily and ungrateful man not as morally refined as her
(good) Christian mother. Having tasted the emancipation of
woman, Safie could not go home. The confusion between "Turk" and
"Arab" has its counterpart in present-day confusion about Turkey
and Iran as "Middle Eastern" but not "Arab."

Although we are a far cry here from the unexamined and covert
axiomatics of imperialism in Jane Eyre, we will gain
nothing by celebrating the time-bound pieties that Shelley, as
the daughter of two antievangelicals, produces. It is more
interesting for us that Shelley differentiates the Other, works
at the Caliban/Ariel distinction, and cannot make the
monster identical with the proper recipient of these lessons.
Although he had "heard of the discovery of the American
hemisphere and wept with Safie over the helpless fate of
its original inhabitants," Safie cannot reciprocate his
attachment. When she first catches sight of him, "Safie, unable
to attend to her friend [Agatha], rushed out of the cottage"
(F, pp. 114 [my
emphasis], 129).

In the taxonomy of characters, the Muslim-Christian Sate
belongs with Rhys' Antoinette/Bertha. And indeed, like
Christophine the good servant, the subject created by the fiat
of natural philosophy is the tangential unresolved moment in
Frankenstein. The simple suggestion that the monster is
human inside but monstrous outside and only provoked into
vengefulness is clearly not enough to bear the burden of so
great a historical dilemma.

At one moment, in fact, Shelley's Frankenstein does try to tame
the monster, to humanize him by bringing him within the circuit
of the Law. He "repair[s] to a criminal judge in the town and
. . . relate[s his] history briefly but with
firmness" -- the first and disinterested version of the
narrative of Frankenstein -- "marking the dates with accuracy
and never deviating into invective or exclamation.
. . . When I had concluded my narration I said, 'This
is the being whom I accuse and for whose seizure and punishment
I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a
magistrate'" (F, pp. 189,
190). The sheer social reasonableness of the mundane voice
of Shelley's "Genevan magistrate" reminds us that the absolutely
Other cannot be selfed, that the monster has "properties" which
will not be contained by "proper" measures:

{253} 'I will exert myself [he says], and if it is in my power
to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment
proportionate to his crimes. But I fear, from what you have
yourself described to be his properties, that this will prove
impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is pursued,
you should make up your mind to disappointment.' (p. 190)

In the end, as is obvious to most readers, distinctions of human
individuality themselves seem to fall away from the novel.
Monster, Frankenstein, and Walton seem to become each others'
relays. Frankenstein's story comes to an end in death; Walton
concludes his own story within the frame of his function as
letter writer. In the narrative conclusion, he is the
natural philosopher who learns from Frankenstein's example. At
the end of the text, the monster, having confessed his
guilt toward his maker and ostensibly intending to immolate
himself, is borne away on an ice raft. We do not see the
conflagration of his funeral pile -- the self-immolation is not
consummated in the text: he too cannot be contained by the
text. In terms of narrative logic, he is "lost in darkness and
distance" (F, p. 211)
-- these are the last words of the novel -- into an existential
temporality that is coherent with neither the territorializing
individual imagination (as in the opening of Jane Eyre)
nor the authoritative scenario of Christian psychobiography (as
at the end of Brontë's work). The very relationship between
sexual reproduction and social subject-production -- the dynamic
nineteenth-century topos of feminism-in-imperialism -- remains
problematic within the limits of Shelley's text and,
paradoxically, constitutes its strength.

Earlier, I offered a reading of woman as womb holder in
Frankenstein. I would now suggest that there is a framing
woman in the book who is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor
yet encircling. "Mrs. Saville," "excellent Margaret," "beloved
Sister" are her address and kinship inscriptions (F, pp.
15, 17, 22). She is the occasion, though
not the protagonist, of the novel. She is the feminine
subject rather than the female individualist: she is the
irreducible recipient-function of the letters that
constitute Frankenstein. I have commented on the singular
appropriative hermeneutics of the reader reading with Jane in
the opening pages of Jane Eyre. Here the reader must read
with Margaret Saville in the crucial sense that she must
intercept the recipient-function, read the letters as
recipient, in order for the novel to exist.28 Margaret
Saville does not respond to close the text as frame. The frame
is thus simultaneously {254} not a frame, and the monster can
step "beyond the text" and be "lost in darkness." Within the
allegory of our reading, the place of both the English lady and
the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text.
It is satisfying for a postcolonial reader to consider this a
noble resolution for a nineteenth-century English novel. This is
all the more striking because, on the anecdotal level, Shelley
herself abundantly "identifies" with Victor Frankenstein.29

I must myself close with an idea that I cannot establish within
the limits of this essay. Earlier I contended that Wide
Sargasso Sea is necessarily bound by the reach of the
European novel. I suggested that, in contradistinction, to
reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing
to a nostalgia for lost origins, the critic must turn to the
archives of imperialist governance. I have not turned to those
archives in these pages. In my current work, by way of a modest
and inexpert "reading" of "archives," I try to extend, outside
of the reach of the European novelistic tradition, the most
powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: that Jane
Eyre can be read as the orchestration and staging of the
self-immolation of Bertha Mason as "good wife." The power of
that suggestion remains unclear if we remain insufficiently
knowledgeable about the history of the legal manipulation of
widow-sacrifice in the entitlement of the British government in
India. I would hope that an informed critique of imperialism,
granted some attention from readers in the First World, will at
least expand the frontiers of the politics of reading.

Notes

1. My notion of the "worlding of a world" upon
what must be assumed to be uninscribed earth is a vulgarization
of Martin Heidegger's idea; see "The Origin of the Work of Art,"
Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York, 1977), pp. 17-87.

2. See Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(New York, 1960); all further references to this work,
abbreviated JE, will be included in the text.

3. See Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
(Harmondsworth, 1966); all further references to this work,
abbreviated WSS, will be included in the text. And see
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
(New York, 1965); all further references to this work,
abbreviated F, will be included in the text.

4. I have tried to do this in my essay "Unmaking
and Making in To the Lighthouse," in Women and
Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally
McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York, 1980),
pp. 310-27.

5. As always, I take my formula from Louis
Althusser, "Ideology an Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation)," "Lenin and Philosophy" and Other
Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), pp. 127-86.
For an acute differentiation between the individual and
individualism, see V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R.
Titunik, Studies in Language, vol. 1 (New York, 1973), pp. 93-94
and 152-53. For a "straight" analysis of the roots and
ramifications of English "individualism," see C. B. MacPherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to
Locke (Oxford, 1962). I am grateful to Jonathan Ree for
bringing this book to my attention and for giving a careful
reading of all but the very end of the present essay.

6. I am constructing an analogy with Homi
Bhabha's powerful notion of "not-quite/not-white" in his "Of
Mimicry and Man: The Ambiguity of Colonial Discourse,"
October 28 (Spring 1984): 132. I should also add that I
use the word "native" here in reaction to the term "Third World
Woman" It cannot, of course, apply with equal historical justice
to both the West Indian and the Indian contexts nor to contexts
of imperialism by transportation.

7. See Roberto Fernandez Retamar, "Caliban:
Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America," trans.
Lynn Garafola, David Arthur McMurray, and Robert Marquez,
Massachusetts Review 15 (Winter-Spring 1974): 7-72; all
further references to this work, abbreviated "C," will be
included in the text.

15. I have tried to justify the reduction of
sociohistorical problems to formulas or propositions in my essay
"Can the Subaltern Speak?" The "travesty" I speak of does not
befall the Kantian ethic in its purity as an accident but rather
exists within its lineaments as a possible supplement. On the
register of the human being as child rather than heathen, my
formula can be found, for example, in "What Is Enlightenment?"
in Kant, "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals," "What Is
Enlightenment?" and a Passage from "The Metaphysics of
Morals," trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (Chicago, 1950). I
have profited from discussing Kant with Jonathan Ree.

16. Jean Rhys, in an interview with Elizabeth
Vreeland, quoted in Nancy Harrison, An Introduction to the
Writing Practice of Jean Rhys: The Novel as Women's Text
(Chapel Hill, 1988). This is an excellent, detailed study of
Rhys.

17. See Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in
Western European Literature Up to the Early Nineteenth
Century, trans. Robert Dewsnap et al. (Lund, 1967), chap.
5.

18. For a detailed study of this text, see John
Brenkman, "Narcissus in the Text," Georgia Review 30
(Summer 1976): 293-327.

23. See George
Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from
Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, 1981), pp.
23-35.

24. Consult the publications of the Feminist
International Network for the best overview of the current
debate on reproductive technology.

25. For the male fetish, see Sigmund Freud,
"Fetishism," The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James
Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 21:152-57. For a
more "serious" Freudian study of Frankenstein, see Mary Jacobus, "Is There a Woman in This
Text?" New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 117-41. My
"fantasy" would of course be disproved by the "fact" that it is
more difficult for a woman to assume the position of fetishist
than for a man; see Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade:
Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23 (Sept.-Oct.
1982): 74-87.

27. See [Constantin François Chasseboeuf
de Volney], The Ruins; or,
Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, trans. pub.
(London, 1811). Johannes Fabian has shown us the manipulation of
time in "new" secular histories of a similar kind; see Time
and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York,
1983). See also Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without
History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), and Peter Worsley,
The Third World, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1973); I am grateful to
Dennis Dworkin for bringing the latter book to my attention. The
most striking ignoring of the monster's education through Volney
is in Gilbert's otherwise brilliant
"Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve," Feminist
Studies 4 (June 1980): 48-73. Gilbert's essay reflects the
absence of race-determinations in a certain sort of feminism.
Her present work has most convincingly filled in this gap; see,
e.g., her recent piece on H. Rider Haggard's She ("Rider
Haggard's Heart of Darkness," Partisan Review 50, no. 3
[1983]: 444-53).

28. "A letter is always and a priori
intercepted, . . . the 'subjects' are neither the
senders nor the receivers of messages. . . . The
letter is constituted . . . by its interception"
(Jacques Derrida, "Discussion," after Claude Rabant, "Il n'a
aucune chance de l'entendre," in Affranchissement: Du
transfert et de la lettre, ed. René Major [Paris,
1981], p. 106; my translation). Margaret Saville is not made to
appropriate the reader's "subject" into the signature of her own
"individuality."

29. The most striking "internal evidence" is
the admission in the "Author's Introduction" that, after
dreaming of the yet-unnamed Victor Frankenstein figure and being
terrified (through, yet not quite through, him) by the monster
in a scene she later reproduced in Frankenstein's story, Shelley
began her tale "on the morrow . . . with the words 'it
was on a dreary night of November'" (F, p. xi). Those are the opening
words of chapter 5 of the finished book, where Frankenstein
begins to recount the actual making of his monster (see
F, p. 56).